Can we take the time to pour one out for the angel Muriel, who deserved SO much better?
They began their story as a wide-eyed innocent. Trampled on and forgotten by their superiors, literally at the bottom of the heavenly hierarchy, but SO eager to do the best they could at the role that was assigned to them.
Their innocence sometimes shows as ignorance (not knowing anything about how the human world works, not knowing how to lie or deceive).
But they are so earnest in their intentions that it's hard not to like them. Even Crowley seems fond of them, despite their seeming lack of intelligence.
I wanted to see Muriel come into their own in GO3.
I felt like they were set up for a character arc of discovery--that, assigned to guard Aziraphale's bookshop in his absence, Muriel would have the opportunity to truly connect with humanity on a personal level, learn about the nuances and shades of gray inherent to life on earth. Things that they could never know if, like many angels, they were forever trapped in the sterile white landscape of heaven forever.
But no. Instead the finale made jokes at Muriel's expense, called them stupid and dense, and then killed them without a resolution to their journey.
We don't even get to see them running Aziraphale's bookshop, because apparently Aziraphale immediately recalls them to work with him in heaven??
It's a small detail in a sea of bad writing choices. But it feels indicative to me of a problem that PERVADES GO3: not only does it fail to deliver a satisfying payoff to most or all of the plot threads set up in S2, it actively backtracks on many of them. Writes them out of existence with barely a word.
(The erasure of Nina and Maggie also come to mind here. They made a meaningful impact on Crowley and Aziraphale's lives, however brief their role in it was, so it's extremely odd to have them written out with no explanation from the characters.)
So when I say GO3 feels like bad fanfic, THIS is the kind of shit I'm talking about. It's badly written because the character arcs that S2 set in motion are never followed through...in favor of completely new, unrelated plot threads such as the gangster subplot.
It's not just about whether i liked the ending (for the record, I didn't). The problems with the writing are pervasive through the finale, start to finish. A happy, soft ending could have saved it. It could have made me forgive its other faults. But we didn't get that either.
So let's remember Muriel for a moment. A kind, happy, sweet angel doing their best. They deserved the chance to break free of heaven's influence and discover who they really are, what they really want to be.
But they never got to find out.
